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Good health

Is Wine The Newest Elixir?

When the news show 60 Minutes reported on the pesticide Alar, everyone quit eating apples.

When it reported on dirty chicken processors, sales plummeted.

And so you can imagine what happened last year when 60 Minutes said wine could protect you against heart attacks.

Sales skyrocketed.

The segment showed the French gobbling up all kinds of buttery, creamy, egg yolky food. And then came this startling news: The French get a lot fewer heart attacks than Americans.

The show indicated that red wine may serve as something of a Star Wars shield against fatty foods. Winemakers went ballistic with the news. They faxed press releases and even transcripts of the 60 Minutes show to any news outlet with a fax machine.

And why not? A good cabernet sure tastes a lot better than oat bran.

Unfortunately, folks, it's not that simple. Wine may be good for you in moderation, but no more so than a couple cans of beer, or maybe an aspirin every other morning, or maybe even a few cloves of garlic.

Dang.

To learn more about wine, and what it may or may not do for your heart, we first must understand why a large percentage of us one day will clutch our chests, fall over and die.

There is a type of cholesterol in your blood, a very bad cholesterol, called LDL. If there is a lot of it, it tends to settle in your arteries. This forms a buildup called plaque, which, by the way, is not to be confused with the plaque that rots your teeth.

Now, you also have something in your blood called platelets. They are cells that sort of float around, looking for holes to plug. When you get a cut, for example, platelets go rushing over and dam up the hole, forming a clot and stopping the bleeding.

Well, platelets do a good job, but they're kind of stupid. This is because when platelets see plaque building up in an artery, the dummies go jumping on it, thinking it's a hole that needs to be plugged. This further closes up the artery and eventually shuts it off.

This is when you grab your chest and die.

Back in 1979 some researchers discovered that a moderate amount of alcohol helps protect you against this process. For some unknown reason, when you consume about two drinks a day, the body starts making more of a kind of cholesterol called HDL. Unlike its evil twin, LDL, HDL is good for you. HDL cruises around the blood in a paddy wagon and collects the bad LDL and carts it off to prison (your liver). From there, it's excreted out of the body.

The more HDL you have, the less chance you'll have of getting a heart attack.

An associate professor of medicine at Harvard University, Charles Hennekens, has reported that those who drank moderate amounts of alcohol every day had a 49 percent lower risk of having a heart attack.

Now, some of you might be thinking, Well, if I drank twice as much as a moderate amount, my risk would be almost 100 percent lower.

Sorry, folks, but it doesn't work that way. When you get to four drinks, you not only lose cardiac benefits, you increase your risk of liver disease.

Now, back to wine. The alcohol in wine is no different than the alcohol in beer or the alcohol in a martini. Therefore, wine does no more than any other form of liquor to boost your HDL.

So, what's this talk from the winemakers about how great their particular brand of booze is?

Well, they say their product has something that other forms of booze do not have, something that may go above and beyond a can of Old Milwaukee to keep the old ticker ticking.

This something is a natural chemical called resveratrol, which is a pretty dumb name, but we're stuck with it.

Here is the scoop on resveratrol.

A while ago, some Japanese researchers discovered resveratrol in an old herbal medicine. So, naturally, they began feeding it to laboratory rats. They reported that it helped prevent the rats' arteries from clogging.

Shortly after that, a plant scientist at Cornell University, Leroy Creasy, discovered resveratrol in wine. He was studying the chemical makeup of grapes, and what better way to get samples of grapes from around the world than from wine?

Resveratrol is what is known as a phenolic compound. There are all kinds of these compounds in grapes. Grape vines produce resveratrol in the leaves, grape skins and grape seeds because the chemical helps ward off plant diseases such as fungus. It is sort of the plant's version of human antibodies.

Researchers think that resveratrol may be good for humans, too. It may boost HDL somewhat. But more importantly, they think that it may prevent those stupid platelets in our blood from running around and jumping on plaque formations in our arteries and clogging them up. It sort of makes the platelets slippery so they can't all pile on top of each other and cling together. But not slippery enough that they won't clot and keep you from bleeding to death in case you cut yourself.

The Wine Institute in California says this is significant because it shows how ''compounds in wine, rather than alcohol alone, may protect the body from coronary heart disease.''